Zomato, a whimsical name again, is my choice for the last letter Z, for today’s #AtoZChallenge, for the theme ‘Brands that people identify with’.

Founded in mid 2008 as Foodiebay by Deepinder Goyal, Pankaj Chaddah, and Gunjan Patidar, and renamed as Zomato in late 2010, it is a rapidly growing online restaurant search and discovery service with presence in 22 countries across the world and a coverage of more than 1 mllion restaurants.

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Sharing great food experiences

Zomato works with the aim to ensure that every meal, for all their users, is a great experience.

Designed around the premise that people feel compelled to share their good food experiences with others, Zomato is a social product that binds a community of foodies together over their shared passion for food.

What sets it apart from restaurant review sites is that Zomato does not limit its users only to reading and writing reviews, but allows them to follow recommendations and reviews of peers and share them with other foodies with similar food preferences.

Make it easy to find food outlets

Whether you are looking for a restaurant, a fast food corner, bakery, cafe or an outdoor restaurants in your vicinity, Zomato helps you with the right selection. It gets you all the information, along with the address, location and cost for two. It also allows you to find out information about the restaurant – if it serves breakfast, vegetarian food, alcohol, or has a wifi and so forth.

The service is constantly innovating to improve user experience.

Zomato has partnered with Uber in 13 countries to make it easy for you to book a cab to reach the restaurant.

They may soon introduce a widget to filter ratings based on the number of stars, making it easier for users to select restaurants of good rating with the click of a button instead of having to scroll through a stack of reviews. Looks like a smart move by Zomato with a focus on customers, and with the potential to keep restaurant owners on their toes.

The ethics of ratings

The issue of fake reviews always crops up at some point or the other with any review based system.

As a restaurant’s rating on Zomato can make a difference to the restaurant’s business, there is a possibility of people planting fake reviews on the platform or maybe even Zomato modifying the ratings or reviews. Thus arises the question of ethics.

“Business ethics is something that we never compromise on”, say the Zomato founders.

To check fake reviews, Zomato deletes multiple reviews coming from the same IP address but they claim that they do not modify ratings to drive footfall to any business. Zomato also detects patterns in user behaviour with data analysis and uses the information to flag fake reviews and ratings.

The name Zomato, now often pops up in conversations around food and restaurants.

The start of 2015 saw Zomato’s entry into the US, with purchase of the restaurant discovery business Urbanspoon. With a number of acquisitions (more than six it appears) in a year, Zomato is certainly a business and a brand to watch out for.

With this I complete the #AtoZ Challenge !!! Yehhh!!!

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Somali K Chakrabarti

Nice blog. Never knew the facts which came forth about the global presence the geographical diversity and the acquisitions made. Makes me reconfirm my belief that if there is an idea and a plan there is a viable business.